From Earth orbit to the Moon and Mars, explore the world of human spaceflight with NASA each week on the official podcast of the Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas. Listen to in-depth conversations with the astronauts, scientists and engineers who make it possible.
On episode 429, we answer your questions from Threads! HWHAP celebrates nine years of podcasting by bringing on Dr. Kelsey Young to discuss the Artemis II lunar science team, and the crew’s lunar flyby observations and photo targets. This episode was recorded in June 15, 2026.
Transcript
Leah Cheshier
Houston We Have a Podcast. Welcome to the official podcast of the NASA Johnson Space Center, episode 429: Artemis II Lunar Science. I’m Leah Cheshier, and I’ll be your host today. On this podcast, we bring in the experts, scientists, engineers, and astronauts, all to let you know what’s going on in the world of human space flight and more.
It’s our anniversary! Nine years ago, we released episode one of Houston We Have a Podcast, and I can’t think of a better way to celebrate our anniversary than to revisit one of my favorite subjects from the Artemis II mission.
If you tuned into Artemis II, you may recall flyby day and a friendly voice speaking with the crew who wasn’t one of the usual capsule communicators. That was Dr. Kelsey Young, the Artemis Science Flight Operations Lead, providing information about the crew’s lunar photo targets, asking questions about what they observed, and reacting with joy – Moon Joy – as the astronauts reported their findings.
We asked on NASA’s Threads account what you wanted to know about Artemis II’s lunar flyby, the lunar science team, and their findings. And today I’m joined by Kelsey Young to get those answers.
Let’s go!
Leah Cheshier
Hi, Kelsey. Thank you so much for joining us today on Houston We Have a Podcast.
Kelsey Young
Thanks for having me. So excited to talk to you.
Leah Cheshier
I am so excited to talk to you. It’s a little bit of a reunion here, and I’m super stoked to get into all things Artemis II and Lunar Flyby. And we had so many questions from people online that we wanted to bring to you today and give you a chance to answer. But before we get into all of that, I want to know about you. So, did you always know that you wanted to work at NASA?
Kelsey Young
You know, I knew I loved the outdoors, so growing up I was outside a lot. I was like the kid who was like in the woods behind my house, like playing in rocks and dirt, which was looking back prophetic. But going to, you know, college and undergrad, I knew that I wanted to do some physical science, and took one geology class, and totally fell in love.
I didn’t really even know that NASA could be a destination for me until I had a planetary science class in undergraduate and learned that, oh, wow, yeah, of course, like there is the ability to do this looking at other planetary surfaces, and so it was kind of an undergrad that I sort of set my sights on, on space exploration.
Leah Cheshier
So, how did you get to NASA? You were an intern, right?
Kelsey Young
Yes, so I, during my graduate work, I wrote a proposal to get my PhD funded by NASA with an advisor here at the Johnson Space Center. And so I actually was a graduate intern for three different full summers, like in residence here at the Johnson Space Center, and through that I got to, you know, kind of meet my responsibilities at university, while also doing this amazing project here at JSC.
Leah Cheshier
Oh my gosh, that sounds like a dream!
So, obviously, you’re here at JSC with us today. You were here doing the Artemis II mission. We all saw you in Mission Control Houston, but you are usually based at Goddard, is that correct?
Kelsey Young
Yeah, I live in the greater Washington, DC area, and I sit at the Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland.
Leah Cheshier
Nice. Well, I’m excited that you were able to make it down, because this one is just a great conversation to have across the table instead of across the internet.
Kelsey Young
Yeah, I will say that, you know, you and I were in the same room together a lot during the mission, but we didn’t actually see each other very often, because we were on opposite sides of the room, so it’s great to be looking at your face!
Leah Cheshier
I agree. There were a lot of like happy glances, I feel like, across the room, but it is really nice to sit here together.
So, we’re going to be asking some questions from our followers on Threads, and J0rdan.marie set us up perfectly to start this conversation, continuing with your trajectory, and asking: How do you become a lunar scientist?
Kelsey Young
I mean, just like all things in life, right, like, science takes all types, right? And so, in undergrad, I totally fell in love with geology, and then found out that I could study the geology of other planets, and just totally got hooked. And I think, you know, one thing I’ve learned throughout my time as a planetary scientist is, if you’re interested in planetary science, there are so many different ways to approach it, right? Like, you can study rocks, like me, you can go out into field sites on earth and learn about processes that shape other planets. But you can also use remotely sensed data, right, data from orbiting spacecraft that collect different types of data, not just images, but spectroscopy and other data sets that are really important for us scientifically. You can be a modeler, right? Like, you can model planetary formation processes and learn something about the evolution of our solar system. There are so many ways to interrogate a planetary surface and the evolution of a planet, and it really takes all of us to put a full picture together.
Leah Cheshier
Do you think you’re going to be focused on the Moon for your whole career, or do you have interest in other planets or asteroids or anything like that?
Kelsey Young
My background is really in planetary analog processes that we see here on Earth that we also see on other planetary surfaces. So, I would say I’m almost all Moon right now, although Mars also is, of course, you know, our agency’s ultimate destination with crewed explorers. But I’m really, you know, my job now is really making sure that science is integrated into to human exploration of other planetary bodies, and so really excited about the Moon, and just like everybody excited to pivot to Mars once once we’ve learned what we need to at the Moon.
Leah Cheshier
Absolutely amazing, I’m excited for all of those things, but focusing back on the Moon today. Let’s talk Artemis II. So, something that we saw a lot during the broadcast was the SER, or the Science Evaluation Room. Tons of scientists in there, tons of screens. I had the chance to go look at it myself. I had no idea you have this table where you can zoom in on the lunar craters. Like, this is so cool, and it almost felt futuristic and next level. And it was so neat real time during fly by day to hear calls from the crew of like, “oh, we’re seeing this, but we can’t tell what it is. Can you guys down there figure it out for us?” And then, like, watching everyone work real time and call back up an answer was so cool. So, tell us about the lunar science team and the Science Evaluation Room, what are the roles represented there? What kind of activities happened there during Artemis II?
Kelsey Young
So much to say there. The lunar science team was, is a collection of roughly 60 people of an incredibly diverse set of skills in their backgrounds, right? Like we, of course, have lunar scientists and geologists, but we also have visualization specialists and developers who actually built the software that the crew was looking at during the lunar flyby. We have geographic information systems, GIS specialists. We have our communications team embedded in our lunar science team. And the operational roles reflected that as well, so we definitely had, like, in the science evaluation room, and we also had an additional back room that was supporting the SER. The roles really reflected that diverse set of experiences, where we did have people that were responsible for keeping their eyes on our lunar science objectives, of which we had 10 objectives, but we also had people who were generating visuals that the team used to help down select lunar targets for imaging, but also that the world saw in the public broadcast. We had people who were on call, essentially to answer questions from the crew on that lunar targeting package, that piece of software they were looking at during the flyby. We had people who were literally and figuratively, keeping the lights on in the rooms, we had people talking to the science officer console. So it was really like almost like a living organism, right, of like flexing to accommodate like what the main science team task was at any given time in the mission, and also what the crew was needing in terms of support, and we really flexed those roles back and forth throughout the mission to accommodate those evolving priorities.
Leah Cheshier
Was that room staffed 24/7?
Kelsey Young
It was not staffed 24/7. It was pretty close to 24/7 staffing, but across our two rooms, the Science Evaluation Room and the SMOR, delicious, Science Mission Operations Room, but it wasn’t quite 24 hours. I- that will shift moving forward on future missions. We anticipate more 24/7 staffing.
Leah Cheshier
Yeah, absolutely, that makes sense. So, there was a ton of preparation leading up to this day. I mean, for every single team, and that includes the Lunar Science team. So, on Threads, Dustysneakers_ wants to know, how did it match the training and the sims?
Kelsey Young
It’s funny, because you know, I actually a nice thing about doing this podcast, you know, so many weeks after the mission is that you know our team is really just like all teams who supported the mission, you know, undergoing the debrief process and the documentation process, and so we’ve had a lot of time to reflect on exactly this question, not to mention getting into the data a little bit. And I think you know one thing we’re hearing is that more time in sims and mission simulations, you know, really, really helped. Of course, that sounds pretty obvious on the face of it, but even just people observing and not serving an operational role really helped our science team, who does not come from a human space flight operations background, get where they needed to in terms of supporting operations.
I think one thing that we maybe struggled with that we couldn’t reflect in the training and the mission sims is- we usually sim like one shift, right, like one day, one crew day. There weren’t a lot of opportunities for our team to simulate multiple shifts in a row, like strung together in a high fidelity way. So, where we saw that come out was a lack of clarity in how we do handovers shift to shift for the science team, right? Like, we’re used to that in the flight control team, and we practice handovers, you know, in the flight control room. But for the science team, who really wants to like have through lines of science discovery. We learned a lot about just the lack of preparation we had of just simming one day at a time. So we’re already working on fixing that for future missions.
Leah Cheshier
Yeah, I mean, you can’t close up the lab and come back and start where you left off yesterday, you know? Like, I remember we would leave at night and we’re almost halfway to the Moon, and then you wake up, and you’re tens of thousands of miles beyond that. You know, the mission keeps moving even when you’re asleep
Kelsey Young
you know. In addition to developing, like, the roles that sat in the science evaluation room and its partner back room, we had to develop the actual rooms themselves. And so, massive shout out to the team who works in mission control, designing new flight control rooms. They’ve kind of designed a couple new rooms, and also renovated some old rooms that you saw, you know, on the broadcast, and we were not a typical room, right? Like, our the needs for science in operations are different, perhaps, than a traditional flight control room, where you have, of course, the rows of flight controllers on headsets attached to the rest of their team. And that is, of course, what we needed for the Science Officer Console, but we really want to make sure that we were designing the rooms, we accommodated for the fact that science is often a discussion, and when we’re actually trying to answer scientific questions with these missions, right? And so this idea of multiple working hypotheses and scientists able to talk science to each other during the mission, we wanted to allow for that more open dialog.
So I, you know, totally remember, and will always carry it with me when I went to those, these amazing designers over in Building 30 at the Johnson Space Center, and I was like, “hi, you know, we have some really unique requirements for this room, and I don’t know, like, what do you think, is this okay?” And they were just like absolutely like let’s lean into this creativity and it’s something that is like maybe outside of our traditional you know structure in terms of how we take a new room and develop it from the ground up but they really saw it as like this creative challenge and exciting and it was just it is such a wonderful relationship with that team because of this mutual respect, understanding, and like wanting to lean into the creativity, and I’ll maybe end that thought with a couple Easter eggs about the room that we designed into the Science Evaluation Room. So, if any, any listeners out there tuned into the room and saw, saw the live stream from the from the Science Evaluation Room, here’s a couple things to go back and look for.
The blue stripe on the wall up at the top, we chose to be the closest to earth blue as possible, and then many of the new flight control rooms have like those hexagonal tiles that are various colors and shades of gray, and I went to them and said, “Hi, me again, can we pick the order that we put them out in?” And they were like, “Yes, I, you know, yes, sure.” And so our hexagonal tiles are arranged to be a representation of the crystal structure of anorthite, which is the dominant moon-forming mineral. So, like all the white parts of the moon, when you look up at night, is anorthosite, which is predominantly composed of a mineral called anorthite. And so, therefore, when you walk in the SER, you walk on the Moon and look back at Earth.
Leah Cheshier
Are you kidding me? Okay, now I have to go on a field trip!
Kelsey Young
Learn about mineralogy…
Leah Cheshier
This is so cool. I love, I love the Easter eggs, and you know something else I was thinking about is something you really couldn’t sim, at least not too often was the lighting that we had during fly by day, you know, that changed with every launch window, with every even launch date, it was going to be something different. So, how was your team ready to adapt to whatever you were going to get for fly by day based on our launch date?
Kelsey Young
I love, I love this question, this topic, because it was a real challenge, but one that the team, like, embraced with enthusiasm, because of the science opportunity it represented. Right? And so, absolutely, we cannot control exactly what day we launch, and we, our team had to be prepared scientifically for any moon that we would get, right? So, like, when we launch, we get there a few days later, and at that moment, 180 degrees of the moon is going to be illuminated, and 180 degrees are not. And so we had to build out a plan to get the crew their list of targets that were reflective of the Moon they would get.
And so what we did, and Dr. Jacob Richardson, also at Goddard, led our team through this targeting process, both pre-mission and during the mission, and essentially we started with a list of targets, or like features on the lunar surface we wanted the crew to observe, just for all of the Moon, 360 degrees of the Moon. And then therefore when they launched, and when they, when they went for their translunar injection burn, we would know, okay, this is the Moon they’re gonna get, like this, we know exactly when they’re going to get there, and therefore, what the illumination is going to be, and so automatically that rules out half of our targets, because those are in darkness. But we still have way too many, because we scientists love to provide lots of opportunities. So we basically crafted a targeting plan that is reflective of our 10 lunar science objectives, and so we had to basically down select that remaining half to best cover our list of science objectives. And we practice that a lot of times, and then when we got in the mission, we were really able to deliver on that cadence, which we needed to, which was in a couple days, we had to turn around the final targeting plan and get it up to the crew, so they could review it by the time they got there. And the window that we launched in, in early April, across the multi-day, you know, possibility of launch dates, the moon changed a lot, and what we were going to be able to see when we got there. And the moon we got- you know, any Moon we were going to get was going to be great- the Moon we got was, we lost a bit of the far side illumination, but we gained the eclipse, so it was just a real pleasure, honor to watch the team like contend with such a wide variety of possible futures, and I think everyone would agree that the Moon we got was pretty great!
Leah Cheshier
It was pretty great. I mean, I do love our Moon. And we have another question, this one from Nell3tate on Threads, and they keyed into something that we talked about during the mission, and that I think is continues to be an important question, which is: why does it matter that we have human eyes on the Moon? So they ask, how and why are photographs taken by the crew better than those taken automatically by machines? What’s different about them, and what extra do they teach you?
Kelsey Young
I’m so glad to- thank you for the question Nell3tate, because I think it’s a really important question, and you know one thing I want to really emphasize is that never was it the goal to have Artemis II or any other Artemis mission become a replacement for other types of missions that take incredibly valuable data on and around the Moon. I’ll use the example, because I’m based at Goddard, and we operate the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter. LRO has been such a vital platform for us scientifically to understand the Moon and even solar system wide processes, as well as prepare for human exploration, right, because those data collected by Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter are really going to be fundamental in helping us traverse plan and characterize landing sites and things like that. But that is not the goal of our science objectives and our observation plan for Artemis II. What was our goal was to capitalize on the mission parameters and what we could uniquely contribute to lunar science with the fact that we had a few awesome things, one of those things was four incredible crew members who were extremely trained, really bought in on the lunar science objectives, and could provide those nuanced observations. We also had a really exciting vantage point, which was a whole disc view of the Moon, and that’s not something we had during Apollo missions, who flew much closer to the Moon.
And the cool thing about that is, and now I’m going to go on an impact cratering rant. Geologic processes, impact cratering at the top of the list, move material like hundreds, if not thousands of kilometers, and so that geologic context is really important. As an example, there is an impact crater in the northern hemisphere of the Moon that called Tycho Crater that has shed material all the way into the South Polar region, so like some of the candidate landing regions for future Artemis surface missions have material on them that came from an impact crater like thousands of kilometers away. And so being able to get human eyes on that context really can help refine our understanding of these really important processes and landing sites.
But that does get at, you know, part of Nell3tate’s question, which is, you know, images are also a really critical data set, of course. What humans can contribute that is unique from that is, you know, human beings, human eyes connected to human brains are like the most sensitive detectors out there, right. They’re also capable of doing things like literally in the blink of an eye that would take an orbiting spacecraft quite a while to put together that kind of observation plan. And so we tried to lean into that when we crafted our targeting plan and our science objectives. The two objectives where that really came out were color and albedo. Albedo is how much sunlight a surface reflects. It kind of manifests a bit as shades of gray, and also photometry, which is basically how illumination plays off of the surface of an object. And so we really tried to lean into that as something that human beings with this vantage point could contribute to the fund of like to the building blocks of science knowledge about the about the moon as a complement to, not a replacement for other science missions.
Leah Cheshier
Yeah, absolutely, you need all parts to make it successful, and to inform what we do in the future.
So, let’s talk about the Moon itself. We have a ton of questions from followers about lunar features, so True_north227 asked: with all the craters on the Moon, how do you know which ones have already been discovered and which ones are newly discovered?
Kelsey Young
I have a feeling I might know where this question is coming from, and you know, I guess I’ll say the features on the moon have been discovered from the perspective of, I mean, we have incredible data from Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter that provides, like- Moon fun fact for you- we actually know the topography of the Moon better than we know the topography of Earth.
Leah Cheshier
What?
Kelsey Young
The Earth has things like vegetation, oceans that make it really challenging to get like that precise topography, but the Moon, we have instruments like laser altimeters on the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter that can map it down to just incredible resolution. And so by discovered, I mean we have discovered the lunar surface, right? Like, we have taken pictures, and often cases, many, many pictures over years of the entire lunar surface. What we haven’t done is name all of those features, and so there is a database of features on the lunar surface that have names, and that you can go on, for example, the Quick Map portal that has layers for all of the named features, and see which features have been named through the IAU process, the International Astronomical Union process, and which have not.
Leah Cheshier
Okay, I want to talk a little bit more about craters, and so did Aleksandra_d99. They asked: How big are the Moon craters generally, in scale with things on Earth at least? Because on some of the pictures, some of them look really, really tiny, and my brain isn’t comprehending what the real size is now. Which I agree, I mean, but the lunar targeting package had some really interesting tidbits, as well as the passport that the crew used on the ground to study with. I remember, and I wish more than anything I could impress you by remembering exactly which feature, but it’s like size of the big island, you know, or the radius is the same distance between Kennedy Space Center and Johnson Space Center, like I, those things make it so real for people and really put it into perspective. So, just give me a variety of craters and their size comparisons.
Kelsey Young
I love this question, especially since I do have a cratering background, so I could talk about craters for the remainder of this podcast. The answer is, there’s a huge, wide spread of sizes. So, like, what I mean by that is we look at lunar samples in the lunar lab that are, that is right across campus from where you and I are sitting right now, and there are microscopic pits on the surface of samples that have been sitting, you know, with that side up facing outer space for billions of years, right. So you can actually see like microscopic tiny little craters, like on the surface of samples. And then you have South Pole-Aitken Basin, which is, we think, the largest basin in our solar system, and it’s over 4000 kilometers across. And then you have everything in between.
I know that this wasn’t maybe the basis of the question, but I think it’s really interesting in the context of planning for future surface exploration, because the sense of scale on the Moon is really, really hard for a number of reasons. One is on Earth, if you’re going out hiking in a remote location and there’s like no roads or you know, street signs that you can kind of gage height off of. You still like, are a human being living on this planet, so you’re like, here is a tree I like rationally can reconcile like how big a tree is, and therefore I can like extrapolate out when I’m standing at a field site on how tall things are. Or you’re near a road and you’re like, great, there’s a road, I know how far across that is. On the Moon, there’s obviously none of that, and not only that, but the curvature of the Moon is different than the curvature of earth, and so it’s you just none of your anchors that you use as like a living, breathing human on earth work on the surface of the Moon. That’s true orbitally too, it’s just a different perspective and vantage point that’s hard to reconcile, and Apollo crews really struggled with it. They had a really hard time gaging distances because they had no scale bar to go off of, and what they ended up doing on Apollo is using shadow length, their own shadow length. So, once you figured out the length of your shadow that you make on the ground, you can say, “Oh, this is five shadows away, and the ground would help them figure out how many meters like what that translated to on the South Pole? When we send astronauts to the surface of the South Pole, that won’t work because illumination changes dramatically during the course of one EVA, extravehicular activity or spacewalk, and so that shadow as shadow length as a metric will fall apart like within an hour of stepping out the door, because that that number will have changed. And so perspective size, how you perceive those things is really, really critical when we think about future exploration, and it’s something like we’re working right now at NASA to try to figure out how to mitigate for our future friends who go to the surface.
Leah Cheshier
This actually makes me feel better, on a personal note, because I remember feeling really embarrassed, and since, since this moment happened in elementary school, when I was learning about the Moon landings, and I asked my teacher why they didn’t just walk all the way around the moon and see the whole thing, and he was like, it’s a little bigger than you think it is.
Kelsey Young
I wish, yeah, mobility will help us out there, but more distance covered on the lunar surface, more science. So I’m with you. Let’s figure out a way to make it happen.
Leah Cheshier
Well, it’s interesting about the shadows, too. You know, we have the Neutral Buoyancy Lab here, 6.2 million gallon pool, and we practice our spacewalks in there. And now we are also practicing moon walks, and they have figured out how to balance out weight to make the astronauts, you know, and simulate lunar gravity, and something that they’ll do is project light to make it, you know, resemble those long shadows that you would see at the South Pole. And that’s something obviously we didn’t do or have during the Apollo day. So it’s fascinating how far we’ve come just as a whole to try and figure out those problems.
Kelsey Young
I’d also add to that, you know, when- I absolutely love that story of like developing this really critical training and development facility to meet evolving agency needs, and it’s a testament to like how creative people are that work here, right? Of like, okay, this is a really hard problem, like, how are we going to work through this? Okay, well, the NBL is really important to get not just the crew experience, but the flight control team, the team that designs the hardware to like help mitigate those things, like spacesuit designers and, you know, people who are working on designs for illumination sources, right? And so they were like, okay, this is hard. And then a creative team was like, okay, like, we’ll just take an end of the pool and we’ll turn it into the Moon. And on the science side, that was led by, you know, folks I work with on a, you know, hourly, hourly basis, Trevor Graf and Angela Garcia, who are based at the Johnson Space Center, and were also the other science officers on Artemis II, and they were just like, okay, how do we do this? Well, first we need something that simulates the moon in terms of, like, a simulant for the rocks and regolith, so they found a simulant that would be close enough in terms of physical properties, but wouldn’t cloud up the water when you walk through it, right? Like, you don’t want to put like dust at the bottom of the pool, and then you’re walking through it, and your whole pool gets filled with dust. Then they design like big boulders to simulate Apollo boulders, because we want the crew members to actually be able to like interrogate rocks when they’re at the bottom of the pool. Then they’re like, well, illumination is a problem, we could turn the lights off, and like, they worked it with the NBL, and the whole team was like united for this common goal. And like, how cool is that? When a bunch of like super smart people work on creative solutions to really hard technical problems, and now we have these NBL runs where we turn down the lights in the NBL and shine lights on the side, and we have crew members walking around a simulated Moon.
Leah Cheshier
It’s so, so cool. We are living in the future. Taking something that we already have and making it work for a future purpose. Love to see it.
So, we’re gonna get back to our questions. Colton.lane.ftm and Laurelorelei on Threads want to know how you determine the age of craters. They specifically asked about Orientale, since some of the crew members had questions about that one. And I remember you telling us before the mission that they were very, very excited about Orientale.
Kelsey Young
I am delighted to be given the opportunity to answer this question, because literally dating the age of creators was the subject of my PhD dissertation. So, thank you for the questions. I will try to rein it in with length of answer. This is something we actually train the crew on. I’m the classroom instructor to talk about lunar chronology, or like figuring out the ages of rocks and surfaces. And how we do it without getting a rock and bringing it back to the lab and running it through amazingly wonderfully complex mass spectrometers here on earth to figure out, you know, relationship of parent to daughter isotopes. You’re probably searching back now to, like, your high school science classes, where you learned about carbon dating and radiometric dating, but we can’t get rocks and regolith from everywhere. And so, what we have done over the last several decades as a planetary science community has developed this technique called crater counting, which is exactly what it sounds like. You look at a surface of a planetary body that you want to know about how old it is, and you literally count craters, and you count the size as well. I actually, I feel like I really like earned my stripes as a planetary scientist in graduate school by doing a crater counting project. Like, you have to, you have to live it, you know, because you’re just, you’re just vibing, looking at pictures of, in my case, the Moon, and you’re literally drawing circles around, like hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of impact craters. It’s great. And the way, then, that you take that number of craters and back out an age is more craters means older surface, and we’ve actually quantified that by developing what is called the crater counting curve. By you take, let’s say, you take like a 10 kilometer by 10 kilometer section of the Moon, and you count the craters of specific sizes, and you plug it into this crater counting curve, and it will spit out a number. That is, of course, an approximation, we call it, you know, a relative age, whereas an absolute age would be putting it in the lab and getting that actual number, and from radiometric dating. But this, this relative age is built on, in large part, Apollo samples, because what we’ve done is counted the number of craters at the Apollo landing sites, and then we have rocks from them, and so we get them in the lab, we date them, and we assign, therefore, a number to that number of craters, right, like an age to that number of craters. But Apollo, while amazing and wonderful for near-sized geology and geography, did is not representative of the entire lunar surface, and specifically the far side, the South Pole, and so by getting samples from the far side and from the lunar south pole area, we can provide those anchors, those absolute ages for the rest of the crater counting curve. And what’s really cool about that is that we use the crater counting curve for planetary bodies across the entire solar system. And so, for example, we don’t have any samples from super old material over 4 billion years old. Once we get those samples, we can inform our understanding of relative ages across the entire solar system by getting samples from the lunar far side and lunar south pole, which is a very long way to say that the answer to your question is counting craters.
But ultimately, if a surface is really, really old, it reaches like maximum density, basically, where like one new crater is going to erase an older crater, because it’s so dense in terms of number of craters that you’re just, you’re creating them as you’re destroying them, and that’s a really, really old surface, and so there it’s a lot more nuanced than just saying count craters and put it into a formula, right? But essentially, yes, if you can see the crater, you count it.
Leah Cheshier
So none of what we can do now in terms of dating things and dating craters would have been possible without Apollo missions.
Kelsey Young
We also have other samples from other planetary missions as well that can help us. So we basically, if it’s literally a curve, like y-axis, x-axis, and you have like a literal curve that starts high on the left and goes low on the right in terms of age, and we have little points along that curve that represent a sample collection from a specific mission. But many of the sample collections are clustered in the same general period of solar system history, which is like in the mid-three billion, 3.5 billion range, and we don’t have a ton of really young samples, and we don’t have a ton of really old samples. So, if we can get samples from surfaces that are much younger and much older, it will help like sharpen the clarity of that curve, and can like refine numbers that we’ve used that curve to date a lot better.
Leah Cheshier
Got it. That makes sense. And so, specifically Orientale, how old is that crater?
Kelsey Young
Orientale? And I want to get back to your question of why the crew was so excited about Orientale. So Orientale is an impact basin that’s predominantly on the far side, you can kind of see like one rim of it on the near side, but it’s mostly by far the majority is not visible to us here on Earth, and it’s a really important basin, because it’s what we call a type impact basin, which is a basin that we use to understand cratering and basin formation across the solar system, because it’s just like a classic example. It’s like when you’re like I think about an impact basin, it’s Orientale that you think of. And we’ve, you know, used remotely sense data collected on Orientale, for example, to tease out how these things form over time, and impact craters are on every solid state body across the solar system, super ubiquitous, and Orientale is like an important basin in the context of like unraveling that process across the solar system. Really, really important, and human eyes, I can now say had never seen it. When we briefed the crew it was have never seen it, because Apollo missions prioritize launching into times when the near side of the Moon was illuminated, because that’s of course where they were landing, is the side of the moon that always faces our planet. And therefore every single Apollo mission that sent people where they could see the far side, Orientale was always in darkness. The crew was very excited about that, because they’re like, “You’re telling me this is an important feature and it’s never been seen before.” So they were, they were really motivated by that, and with Orientale, it’s less about the age, it’s more about getting the visual observations of color, albedo, topography to provide the human connection to supplement the orbital data that tells us about impact cratering as a process.
Leah Cheshier
Fascinating, or it was exciting to hear them get excited about it as they approached the Moon, and it was coming into view. So yeah, I was, I was game for Orientale as well.
Kelsey Young
I will say one of my favorite parts of the flyby, and like looking back, where you know we’re deep in data analysis mode right now, and still after looking at, you know, thousands and thousands of images and audio files, like what sticks out to me as like something that I’m most proud of and inspired by is we worked really hard to make sure that even though they were not doing an EVA or space walk in a pressurized suit, which is something that you always need a buddy in, even though they were all IVA intravehicular activity, they were inside the vehicle. We worked really, really hard to still get them working together on the tasks we were asking them to do. So, what we did not want is like, I’m gonna ignore the existence of you, and I’m just follow my traverse plan here, my targeting plan here, and I’m just gonna be in my little bubble, and I’m just gonna like hammer out these photos, these observations. We wanted to create, like really the sense of you are exploring as a field science team, because in fact they are members of our science team, right? Like, they’re just the ones doing the actual field exploration, and when you go out to do field geology on earth, I can tell you that you never go by yourself, not just for safety, but also because more brains are better than one when you’re trying to answer a complicated question. And so we really tried hard in terms of like the con ops for the flyby for how the crew would work together, and to set up the hardware that they were using to do our science objectives. We tried really, really hard to ensure that they could work as a team, and one way we did that is putting them in pairs, and having them work on the same targets at the same time. And we talked a lot about it. We practiced it a ton with the crew, and I remember during the flyby, especially Victor and Christina, immediately started to call down when they were paired up, and they were like, “Oh my gosh, like we are elevating each other, like when I say a thing, she’s picking up on the thing that I’m saying, and therefore I’m more informing my future observations because of an observation Christina made,” and they’re like reporting this live, like on the flyby, and I’m like trying not to melt into a puddle of joy! And then later- I thought that that was even like the best it was gonna get, and then later they were literally like having a conversation about multiple working hypotheses for Far Side Crater Formation, like live during the flyby, and it’s because like they were able to work together as a team and like fulfill this vision of exploration science. And they were like asking us to like, okay, could you answer this question, because it’s going to inform what we’re doing, because we’re we’re torn between this hypothesis and this hypothesis, I’m just like, “it’s happening! This is so great!”
Leah Cheshier
No, that’s so cool. And I’m glad you mentioned that, because I was about to. I vividly remember them calling down and saying this is a must for future missions of having the discussion time and having us work in pairs. That was such good foresight to have them do that together, and I can only imagine how it felt to you.
Kelsey Young
It felt really good, hearing it real time.
Leah Cheshier
That’s so cool. So I want to go back to something. So I want to go now to something that I was fascinated about, and we got a lot of questions about, which is colors on the Moon. desiree_zimmerman, Lej_s, Goatbree, Dustysneakers_, and A_i_x_a__c_a_l_d_e_r_a are all curious, why the crew could see colors. So, is that harder for cameras to capture, and what kind of minerals might that indicate are present?
Kelsey Young
Oh my gosh, you’re asking me about mineralogy. This is so great!
Leah Cheshier
Let’s do it.
Kelsey Young
So, I will take you back briefly to Apollo 17, when Jack Schmidt and Gene Cernan were on one of their EVAs or spacewalks, and you have this iconic moment. If you have seen or read or heard anything about Apollo, you’ve probably heard the line, “It’s orange soil! Like, oh my gosh, it’s orange soil!” When Jack Schmidt saw regolith on the lunar surface, that appeared to him to be like a vivid orange color. And he collected that sample, and ultimately getting that sample back in our lab here at the Johnson Space Center, we learned something about the type of volcanic activity that was once present at that location, and how recently it was active, because of it turned out the process that formed. This was this like type of volcanic activity, this fire fountaining type of activity. And ultimately it was a crew member’s observation of color that led to that sample being collected, and therefore us, you know, in of course in concert with other samples and other analyzes, learning something new about the Moon that we didn’t know before.
And then that clip is played a lot. What is played not as much is the orbital connection to that moment where Jack Schmidt made that observation, and Ron Evans, who was by himself up in the command module orbiting the Moon, clued into the landing site where his colleagues were doing their surface work, and said, “Oh my gosh, like I see it now, like I see orange is starting to pop out, and I can see that they’re just at the one edge of it, like I can see that it goes up to the north. And then the surface crew launched back up and joined Ron Evans, and they did another rev, and they passed over the landing site again, and they couldn’t see the orange. And that is because the sun was shining on much a different angle on that site as when Ron Evans had observed it the first time. And you- there is a, there is a back and forth between Ron and Jack and the Capcom, like saying, you know, Ron says he didn’t see it, and Jack says, yeah, I don’t see it either. And it’s because of the illumination.
And so there, I mean, like, with anything in science, like, there’s so many like interlocking variables, right? Like, color matters, the angle of illumination to allow you to see that color matters, and again, I’ll like reiterate, not a replacement for amazing high-res images of those places, but human beings are able to capitalize on their unique vantage point, and human eyes are really, really sensitive color detectors. And so they can pick up on nuance that, depending on the type of camera, the type of instrument you have, it might not be able to detect at all times. You heard Jeremy very early in the flyby start to describe Aristarchus Plateau, which was, if you look up at the moon at night, which I encourage everybody to do, always, and it’s close to full, and you look in the upper left quadrant of the moon, you see like a vivid white spot that is Aristarchus, and it is kind of at the bright spot is at the southern end of this big elevated plateau, which is, we think, formed volcanically. And Jeremy immediately started to clue into green, unique green colors, and like taking an aggregate, when you look at all the data from the flyby, he doesn’t see that green again. Nobody sees that green again. So that’s telling us something about a process going on at Aristarchus that is likely volcanic in nature. It tells us something because you can still see the green color, like from their vantage point, it hasn’t been weathered away by space weathering or eroded by other craters, and it tells us something about the type of process that was active at that point, and it tells us that of the moon that they saw it was unique. So color ultimately traces to mineralogy, and mineralogy traces to the process that formed the surface you’re looking at.
Leah Cheshier
That’s fascinating. I mean, just to think that the Moon could have any color, and to think it has multiple colors, very, very cool. I really appreciate learning about that portion.
So, wait, so the minerals that were in the orange samples- I mean, orange soil samples, no samples of oranges coming from the Moon. What kind of minerals would cause that type of color, it’s rust, you said?
Kelsey Young
It’s like iron-based mineralogy that we think, and it was formed in like glass beads, basically, that we think was formed from, like, picture, like, there are a lot of eruptions going on at Kilauea Volcano in Hawaii right now, and you sometimes see videos of, like, the literal fountains. Picture that, and you have, like, lava that gets, you know, magma that gets erupted into lava at the surface, and it’s like fragmenting immediately and turning into that fountain, and the surface area to volume ratio of those particles means that, like, essentially quenches like immediately, like glass. Like immediately, there’s not time for, like, larger crystals to develop, it just immediately quenches, and so we think that that is a big contributor to what Jack Schmidt found on Apollo 17.
Leah Cheshier
Wow, love it. And then something else that I know your team was hoping that the crew would see, but again, no guarantees, but came back into play with us having less illumination on the far side of the moon were impact flashes. What a cool moment! So we had viewers that really picked up on that too. James.rider.89, Julialuli, Maddiebeesreads, Jodebtn, Cassiroll, and Emgecko all want to know what do those teach us about the Moon and solar system. How does that inform future lunar missions? And then this one was a good question. Is there any concern for extended presence on the Moon?
Kelsey Young
Yes, that is a great question. And yeah, so impact flashes were a science objective of ours, like I keep saying, we had ten objectives, and this was one of our top priority objectives was to have human observations of any potential new impact craters forming. We had at least two examples during Apollo where Apollo crew saw impact flashes. Jack Schmitt was, again, keep coming back to him. He had a moment where he saw an impact flash forming, and it’s we played that audio for the crew in training, and we tried to bookkeep time in their flyby like profile for them to look at the unilluminated part of the moon to see if they could see any flashes. And I think probably if you would, if you would poll the members of our team on if they thought that we, that the crew would see any, you’d get a bunch of answers. We genuinely did not do that before the mission. I will say I did not expect to see any…
Leah Cheshier
Really?!
Kelsey Young
And I think you saw the shock. Yeah, science lady is excited. I was excited. I was also a little shocked, and it was, it was like, honestly hilarious, looking back and like listening to the audio, because it’s like, you know, it’s Victor Glover that’s like reporting it, and he’s like, “yeah, like we saw a couple flashes,” and I’m like, “wait, what?” Like, a, we saw at all, and be multiple, and you heard me say, like, you know, kind of like, are you sure, like, is that really what you meant to see? Like, what do you mean, just like bright spots? And he was like, no flashes, we saw multiple, and then you know, the that period keeps progressing, and then he’s like reporting more that they’re like seeing more, and then there’s like a five minute period that goes by, and he says, like, kind of bummed out, like, we haven’t seen any in a while. Oh no, nevermind, there was one. It was like crazy, hilarious looking back.
But besides being like kind of just funny and excited, and you know, really a moment of learning for, for them and for us, that they were seeing multiple flashes. It tells us something interesting scientifically, too, of course, because what lunar impact flashes are a part of is like the modern lunar environment, like that’s part of the story of what the lunar surface is experiencing at any given time, which we really care about scientifically, because we want to characterize that environment, but it’s also, of course, important to think about we are going to have, you know, friends and colleagues on a lunar surface soon, as well as hardware that they need to keep them alive and happy. And so understanding lunar environment, and it’s not just flashes, it’s dust lofting, electrostatic charging, like all of the conditions that make the lunar regolith what it is, like characterizing that is really important, so that we can design our hardware, designer systems to keep our crews safe. And other hardware, not crewed, like our rovers on the surface of the Moon, and things.
And the important thing to know is that we were not surprised by new craters forming on the lunar surface, the lunar reconnaissance orbiter, because it has been up there for over 16 years, taking pictures over and over and over again of like the same locations, and all of a sudden, oh, hey, like, here’s a new crater that wasn’t there the last time we took a photo of that area. And they found hundreds of new craters that have formed in the 16 years since LRO has been operating. And so it was not a surprise that there are things forming. I’ll also say that, like, based on the crew descriptions of the flashes, the particles that formed the flashes were probably very small, like on the order of, like, a centimeter. Because, in part, of the lack of atmosphere, like, it makes more of a visual impact, pun not intended. And the other thing to know is the lunar surface is active, like you know, characterizing the lunar environment. There are things we need to contend with, and also the International Space Station also has, you know, monitoring for, you know, micro meteorites that could, could potentially impact the International Space Station.
It’s kind of like part of the reality of keeping human beings safe, happy, productive in space. What is important is to characterize that flux and figure out what, if anything, we can do to mitigate it. And so, having human observations of these things actively forming tells us something about flux, which matters. We want to understand, like, how many of these things are forming, and it’s data that we wouldn’t normally have. And we have earth-based telescopes that specifically monitor the near side for flashes. Most notably, there’s a group at the Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama, that monitors for impact flashes, but they can only see the near side, and the crew had a vantage point of looking at the far side. And so the fact that we had human beings there and could capture something that, or that we never would have seen otherwise, is just a testament to the value that these missions can bring.
Leah Cheshier
That’s so cool. I mean, and also a little plug for the International Space Station, of, you know, we’re learning to track micrometeoroid and orbital debris. And that’s really also helping pave the way for how are we going to do this when we, when we go to the moon, so-
Kelsey Young
Yeah, and of course there are things that are like not extensible, right? Like ISS is still close enough for the earth that there’s some protection, but absolutely right, we’re using, you know, the experience we have available to us to constrain. How we can monitor and mitigate for these types of things.
Leah Cheshier
And materials too.
Kelsey Young
Exactly.
Leah Cheshier
Materials that we might use on the space station that might work well or need to be improved for anything on the Moon. Very cool.
Kelsey Young
Go ISS.
Leah Cheshier
Go ISS. Well, this question from Leah Cheshier…
Kelsey Young
Wait a minute…
Leah Cheshier
Okay, this is a question from me I had to plug in. How did it feel just to speak directly with the crew, and to experience this day that you and your team had been preparing for for years? I mean, I cannot imagine keying in my mic and talking to the crew on this monumental mission when they are elbows deep in some of the most important work, you know, that we’ve had going on around the Moon in a long, long time, and I would have been nervous as could be. So, what is it like for you?
Kelsey Young
I was really nervous. Yeah, I was really nervous to represent my team and the lunar science community. I was nervous that a lot of people were gonna hear my voice that day. And frankly, that was brought home to me in our pre-brief for that shift when you, when it came to you, and you were like, you know, “Good morning, we’re like excited for the day! Like it’s going out on all these platforms! That’s it Ready to support!” And I was just like, “Oh no. This is a nightmare!”
But in all seriousness, it was a huge responsibility and a huge honor, frankly. And I want to give shout outs to two people in particular that were a massive part of enabling that, and that’s Jenni Gibbons, who, of course, is one of the backup crew members for Artemis II, and was the Capcom that day, and Jeff Radigan, who was the lead flight director for Artemis II, and they- I mean, the trust that they showed in me to, you know, come to a day that had a lot of responsibility and eyes on it, and trust me in that moment, trust our console and our team in that moment to have that responsibility, like I can’t not say thank you enough to those two individuals. Because it was really like our trust building, our relationship building, and their faith in me to and our team to enable that. And what it did was it enabled more science, right, because I could just immediately respond with, “oh, clarifying question,” and that clarifying question really crystallized something for us, right, and so it’s not just like, hey, it’s pretty convenient to be able to talk to them, it actually impacts science return from the mission period, and the fact that they, they empowered me and trusted me to fill that role was both really exciting and also a huge weight on my shoulders of like wanting to do a good job and also wanting to support the crew. I mean, this is like a moment of the mission that- in all moments they’ve trained for years, but for this it’s like I have been, you know, side by side with them, like preparing for that day for three years, and it was just an incredible responsibility to like really make the most scientifically of what we were doing, while supporting four people that I came to like really, really care about a lot.
Leah Cheshier
That’s really sweet. It’s been, it was very, very cool to watch it real time, and to hear the conversations, and it was clear that it was something that you all had worked together on for a long time, and those conversations were there, and the relationship was there.
Kelsey Young
Yeah, thanks.
Leah Cheshier
So, now mission is over. Artemis II is back on Earth. We still have questions. Threads users seethewonderllc and Ckmcreates want to know if there’s been an unexpected discovery, something that surprised you, or if you saw something you were expecting with the science objectives? And I know there’s a science report coming out. What’s the, what’s all that about?
Kelsey Young
Yeah, so honestly, like in many ways for us in lunar science, like the mission was like the start, not the end, right, of like in so many ways, right? First of all, we learned a lot about how to do science from the Orion platform. We, and specifically lunar science, in my case, right, like, we learned what the vehicle conditions and constraints and design did for us for science. We learned how to take images of the Moon through the windows at the vantage point that they had. And also it was really important to us, you know, I’ve talked a couple times on this pod of our ten lunar science objectives, what I haven’t mentioned is, you know, our other focus, which was setting future teams up for success and learning about how to integrate lunar science and geology into operations. So we had a number of objectives specifically spelled out to do that, of we knew that it was not from a science operations perspective, how our team was structured, how the room was structured. We knew that we were gonna, some things were gonna work and some things were not gonna work, and that was part of the charter of our team was to like maximize efficiency, learn our lessons, so that future missions, when we have, for example, crews on the surface, are set up for success operationally, of how our science teams like integrate into this broader operations environment. And so it was really, really important to us to not only honor our lunar science objectives, but to learn how to accomplish lunar science and geology for the future.
And so in that capacity, our team is generating several products that will be released publicly later this year. We have a lunar preliminary lunar science report, which is touches on the ten objectives and what we were able to do about them. And the intent there, right, is not that we are solving all ten lunar science objectives, right, like we’re saying, here are the data that we got that could help address them, and at the same time releasing all of the data publicly, so that the science community and the global community in general can dive into the data and see what they can find with the data. And so we have that report, we have all the data, we have a data user’s guide, so you can figure out what, where, what is where, and how to get it, how to access it. And then we also have an operations report, which summarizes what we did operationally as a record, a public record of how our team was structured and how we operated, and so it’s really, really important to us. Again, we took the charge to set the community and future missions up for success really seriously, and it’s also really important to us to get all of this information out to the public as soon as we possibly can. So the intent here is not that we are answering every lunar science question with this data set, it’s to open the door and take one step toward this new future and this new generation of lunar exploration.
Leah Cheshier
No, that’s so interesting. I mean, I think that’s such a wealth and a gift to the scientific community, and obviously I’m not a lunar scientist, but I really look forward to reading it too.
Kelsey Young
Yeah, and I mean, we, we took, we took that as like weight on our shoulders too, in a good way, in a positive way, I think, as well. Because you know, Apollo was so transformative in unlocking discoveries about not just the Moon, but our whole solar system, and specifically our planet. And I mean it is still now over 50 years later like the subject of new students’ PhD dissertations and postdoc work. We are still learning things scientifically about the Moon, the Earth, and our place in the solar system now from the science data that were collected during Apollo, and that started, for example, with Apollo 8, when we sent a crew around the far side of the moon for the first time. And so Artemis II is the first step in this journey, and we carry it very seriously that the same will be true for these missions, of data collected here will help us, in addition to missions like LRO, et cetera, to unlock this new generation of discovery about lunar science, and our planet, and our collective role in the universe.
Again, first step, and I just can’t stress enough, like it’s the first step of many, and this is for everyone, like we really, really want to see what the global community can do with these data, and what you all can help us learn about the evolution of our solar system. And so this is for everyone. Please, please, please look at the data, get into the data, ask us questions about the data, and there’s more to come.
Leah Cheshier
It’s so cool to think about being on the forefront of discoveries that large again, because the Apollo missions were 60 years ago, you know, those samples were collected 60 years ago, and to think that we’re still learning from them, and I know there were some recently unsealed within the last few years, and that way they could be tested with the technology that we have today, which was excellent foresight on NASA’s part. But just to think that you know we’re gonna get a whole fresh batch of these, you know, very, very soon, like that is so exciting to think about.
Kelsey Young
Yeah, absolutely. And to give you like a little sense of how much we’ve come scientifically since Apollo- we had not yet like proved and come to consensus on the theory of plate tectonics when those samples were collected from Apollo. And of course, the Moon is not a plate tectonics, but just trying to give you a sense for like how our understanding of planetary processes has evolved since the time those samples were collected. So I honestly can’t wait to see like what future us is saying 54 years from now, when they’re like, they didn’t even know that X and such was a thing when they collected those data from Artemis missions.
And another point, if you’ll permit me, another moment to just emphasize to the to the listening audience as well, of the Moon is a witness plate for the solar system and for our planet, and so this idea that the moon is like literally in our cosmic backyard, and so what the Moon has experienced, the Earth has experienced, but the Moon still retains our early solar system, our early planetary record, whereas the Earth, that material has been erased by plate tectonics, by oceans, by vegetation, and so this idea that by visiting specific parts of the moon we can actually learn something about our early history is really inspirational for me. And it’s, you know, it tells us something scientifically, and it also answers some pretty fundamental questions about how our early earth formed and evolved. What created the conditions for life? Could we see those conditions elsewhere? There’s a lot of power that will come from this new generation of lunar samples.
Leah Cheshier
That’s so cool, it’s so fascinating to think about on that broad of a scale. So, to wrap us up today, let’s take a little moment to continue looking forward to the future. Fnessler and Rachel_naylor want to know what question about the lunar surface you are most excited for the future Artemis missions to investigate? And what do you think the most surprising or impactful insight from Artemis II might be?
Kelsey Young
I’m gonna, I want to answer both of those. So, the first one, I think if you asked, like, you know, pick your number, one hundred lunar scientists, what their favorite question is, you’d get, like, slightly different, you know, a hundred different answers that are slightly different. My favorite, since you are asking me, is the age of the South Pole-Aitken Basin, that ginormous multiple thousand kilometer across impact basin that’s predominantly on the lunar far side, and getting the age from the South Pole-Aitken Basin. If we can get a sample, get it back dated in the lab, it can help us anchor that early part of that crater counting curve that we were talking about earlier, and this idea that getting a sample back, most likely multiple samples, and figuring out, you know, an absolute age could tell us something about timing of evolution of the whole solar system. If we were to get those right samples. That’s, I think I’m so excited for South Polar surface crews to be able targeting, you know, getting samples that will ultimately help us buy down that uncertainty we have about early solar system chronology.
And I do really want to talk about the most surprising or impactful insight from Artemis II, will be, and it ties on part of a question that you asked earlier that we didn’t really have a chance to circle back on, which is what surprised me. And I think I just, I never thought about, like, literally never one time before we launched did I think about, like, the public reaction to the mission and the amount of, like, overwhelmingly positive support that the entire team got. And I just, I never stopped to take a minute to think about it, because we were just, you know, we’re going a hundred miles an hour, making, making sure we’re prepared for the mission, and seeing, you know, of course, for the entire mission, support for the whole mission, the crew, every single person who worked even just one ounce on the mission, but specifically for the science team as well, and like seeing the reaction from the global public, specifically about science’s place in a mission like this, really to me is going to be the most impactful insight for me, right? Because the world was united by seeing a bunch of really smart people work really hard to do something that was really hard and do it well. And science is only a tiny piece of that, of course, but knowing that we can have one small role in, like, a kid looking at science integration into human spaceflight, and maybe going on to do something not necessarily just human space flight, but something that they are passionate about, that they are excited about, that’s going to make a difference to them, the people around them in the world. Like having even that small hope of reaching somebody that for whom seeing us live out our dream will help them live out their dream. To me, that’s the most impactful insight and take away from the mission.
Leah Cheshier
I can’t put a better bow on it than that. I mean, I- this time has gone way too fast, I can’t believe we’ve been talking for over an hour!
Kelsey Young
And I could keep going, but probably all these nice people have to go home.
Leah Cheshier
I could keep going. This has just been such a- I feel rich that we got to sit down today and talk through all of this. I cannot thank you enough for making time for us while you’re here at JSC, for everything you did through the mission. And just for everyone listening. I mean, Kelsey was plugged into meetings for us before the mission, you know, helping us understand what we’d be able to see and show on the broadcast on fly by day, and what we could expect from the crew. And so just, just a huge thank you for all of your forward work that you did with us, and then for sharing all of the Moon joy with us through the mission, and then of course being here today, and everything you and your team continue to do to make it accessible for all of us. Just, thank you so much for being here.
Kelsey Young
I really appreciate the support today and every day, and I’m looking forward to doing it again.
Leah Cheshier
Let’s do it again.
Leah Cheshier
Thanks for sticking around. I hope you learned something new today.
You can check out the latest from around the agency at nasa.gov. Our full collection of episodes and all of the other wonderful NASA podcasts can be found at nasa.gov/podcasts.
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This interview was recorded on June 15, 2026
Our producer is Dane Turner. Audio engineers are Will Flato and Daniel Tohill. And our social media is managed by Leah Cheshier and Kelcie Howren. Houston We Have A Podcast was created and is supervised by Gary Jordan. Special thanks to Victoria Segovia for helping to plan and set up this interview. Another special thanks to everyone who submitted a question to NASA’s Threads account. These were some really great questions, and we hope to answer more in the future. And, of course, thanks again to Kelsey Young for taking the time to come on the show.
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